Technology can be funny. Or at least the people using it can be.
Am I the only person to get a friend request on Facebook or an invite from LinkedIn out of the blue from someone you haven’t seen or heard from in say 10 or 20 years…with no message in it or anything. Just a request to link up, and that’s it.
I typically email the person back – since that’s the mode of communication offered – and tell the person that I’m happy to hear from them, tell them a few things I’m up to and usually ask them a question or two about themselves.
And I typically get no response.
What’s the point?
I don’t understand why someone would bother to send you an indication that they want to see what you’re up to, but not bother to actually see what you’re up to, or to let you know how they’re doing.
I recently received a LinkedIn invite from a guy I went to university with and haven’t seen or heard from since 1994. No note, just a request. I accepted the invite and included an email to him. I never heard back from him.
Did he forget how to type?
Was he that desperate to get access to my Contacts list?
I can see a day when you bump into someone you haven’t seen in years and upon asking them how they’re doing, they respond by saying “check my blog.”
It’s sort of like anti-social networking. You’re kind of networking but not really since networking normally involves actually speaking with other people not just hiding behind a keyboard doing it.
In a career-related sense, actually keeping in touch with people – whether by phone, face to face, email, social websites, etc – is a great idea. Networking is a related topic and there is certainly no harm in keeping in touch with former school mates, colleagues, managers and the like. You never know when you might be able to help each other out.
When I log into LinkedIn, I noticed that when I hovered my mouse over the URL, it said “Relationships Matter.” Apparently they don’t matter all that much in some cases.
